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How to best migrate / rebrand our organisation without losing the SEO on our current website?

I searched the current questions and found similar questions but nothing as specific as what I wanted, so...

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We are a graphic design school in Melbourne Australia. We have a website - www.graphicschool.com.au - that ranks fairly well in Google for our particular search terms. We have rebranded the organisation and want to change the website domain name to the new branding - www.grenadi.vic.edu.au - but obviously do not want to lose our hard earned SEO and rankings. We only have two strategies so far, and are not sure what the pros and cons to either strategy are, or whether there is a better way.

The two ideas we have are:

Option 1) Just swap the domain name.

We were thinking about swapping the domain name and setting up 301 redirects to tell Google that the old page that ranked well is now this page 'x' on the new site. I've read that you lose all your valuable links doing this because they are domain specific and the 301 doesn't forward your links.

Option 2) Build a second website.

This idea is that we would build a second website with our new domain name and branding and build up that site until it ranks as highly as the first site and then start to remove the first site. We're planning on completely redeveloping the current website anyway and changing and adding lots more content as well so this option is not out of the question.

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Any help, thoughts, suggestions or further options would be greatly appreciated. Feel free to discuss.

Can I also please suggest that a new category is added under 'The SEO Process' - something like 'rebranding / migration'

Take your existing site exactly as-is, and change to the new URL. Then use a single 301 to redirect traffic to the new site.

I would suggest not making any improvements to your site until you see all of your pages listed in SERPs with their new URLs. You may be tempted to make adjustments, but it will make tracking improvements harder to measure.

Thanks for your answer it was very helpful. So the following strategy would suit:

1) Swap domain name and put a single 301 redirect on the entire old domain name to go to the new domain name, which would work because all the pages would be the same.

2) Once I waited a while and had decent stats on the redirect I could then start to make changes to the pages on the site and keep an eye on their rank. Would you do this on an individual page by page basis or build out new content for the existing pages offline then update the whole site at once?

Lastly, what are the best tools for evaluating and analysing pre and post migration SEO of the site? At the moment I only have Google Analytics... is there something more comprehensive that is SEO specific that I should be watching it with. I've never used the SEOmoz campaign toolset (only signed up this week) so I don't know how it works, or even what it does - is that the best thing to use?

For #2, the waiting period length is dependent upon how quickly your entire site is updated in Google. This time period varies based on the size of your size, how deep some content is within your site, the popularity of your site's pages, and other factors.

Post migration you want to confirm the 301 is working, ensure your pages are canonicalized correctly, then submit an updated sitemap to Google and Bing.

Presently your Google SERP should show the links to your existing domain. After the migration, your most popular pages should show the links to the new domain within a day or so. It would not be unusual for it to take several weeks for all your pages to be updated. I would recommend waiting to make changes until after the majority of the site's pages had their URLs updated in SERP. That is the best measure that the migration has gone smoothly.

Post migration, you can then make any desired changes to the site and track the results from those changes without wondering about worrying about the migration contaminating your results.

For site-wide changes, you can start off with adjusting a few pages and see how your results are impacting before applying the change to your entire site.

The campaign tool is wonderful. Look at the tutorial and learn everything you can about it. It can help you measure and track your site's SEO performance.

"I've read that you lose all your valuable links doing this because they are domain specific and the 301 doesn't forward your links."

Where did you read this? It's entirely incorrect. A 301 redirect will credit 90-99% of your link juice as well as all users and bots. The best approach here is to setup your .com.au domain branded and setup the way you want, then 301 all your old pages to the most relevant ones on the new domain. You will maintain the vast majority of your link juice this way and get to use the brand/domain you want.

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